Numlock News: January 7, 2026 • South Pole, Prairie Cemeteries, Jellyfish

Jan 07, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Olympics

NBC announces it has sold out its advertising for the upcoming Winter Olympics. The network claims that it has set a new record for winter games sales, though it didn’t provide a hard number. The previous record was the 2022 Beijing Olympics, which brought in $963 million in total revenue. One reason for the early sellout was the favorable time zone of the Milan Cortina games, which are just five hours ahead of the East Coast. Comcast paid $1.03 billion for the rights to the Milan Games, but the real action is coming up in Los Angeles, where NBC is paying $1.51 billion for the 2032 Games.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Jellyfish

A new study argues that jellyfish sleep for about eight hours a day and also take midday naps. On average, jellyfish of the species Cassiopea andromeda pulses its body around 37 times per minute, responding rapidly to bright light and food in simulated daylight. At night, the pulsing slows down considerably, and the species took longer to respond to light and food — a state that lasted around eight hours.

Carissa Wong, New Scientist

Utah

The state of Utah has made it easy for any busybody to ban a book throughout public schools across the state. A law passed in 2024 allowed banning a book statewide if at least three public school districts (or two public districts and five charter schools) deem it sensitive material. This means that any Helen Lovejoy in the hinterlands can force a book off the shelves statewide, and today the list stands at 22 books, more than any other state. Another three — Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky — were added at the start of the year. Of the 42 public school districts in Utah, just two districts account for 80 percent of the books banned statewide.

Kelly Jensen, Book Riot

Heroes

A cover of the 1977 David Bowie song “Heroes” got a big needle drop at a fateful moment in season one of Stranger Things. The original song’s appearance in the credits of the finale of the show has sent streams of the Bowie version up as much as 500 percent. The song averaged 94,000 daily streams over the previous five months, but since the finale, the song has racked up 342,000 streams on New Year’s Day, 456,000 on January 2 and 470,000 streams on January 3. The Prince song “Purple Rain,” also featured in the finale, has seen a 243 percent increase in streams. At this point, I think the way forward for television is for music license holders to just bankroll shows on the provision that they feature their dusty back catalog at crucial moments. I think that has only really happened with The Umbrella Academy, but I really do thinkit could save television.

Jessica Lynch, Billboard

Passwords

Most passwords are too hackable, with Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report arguing that just three percent of unique passwords are complex enough to beat hackers. The successor of the password is believed to be the passkey, which allows login by way of cryptography linked to a person’s device, and which is then unlocked by biometric information like a face scan or a fingerprint. Microsoft has started pushing it, and other large tech companies are seeing swift adoption, with Roblox reporting that passkey authentication increased by 856 percent in the second quarter of last year.

Chris Stokel-Walker, New Scientist

Prairie

Iowa was once completely covered by prairie, but that native flora has been wiped off the map by the monocultures of corn and soybeans now covering 65 percent of the state’s land area. Less than 0.1 percent of Iowa’s original prairie remains, so discovering rare places where that original ecosystem survived a century of heavily industrialized agriculture is no small miracle. One such place is the “pioneer cemeteries,” or graveyards that have been relatively undisturbed since their occupants entered the pre-exploited prairie. According to the Iowa Prairie Network, there are 136 known cemetery prairies across the Midwest, and the Network is on the hunt for more. Some of those prairie remnants contain as many as 250 species. Almost all the land in Iowa is privately owned, and 60 percent of Iowa’s public land is just the ditches on the side of the roadway. Still, those roadside rights-of-way have seen samples from prairie remnants reintroduced in the 1990s. Some 50,000 acres of roadsides have been planted with native grasses and wildflowers.

Christian Elliott, Noēma

Pole Dancing

The staff of the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has moved the marker identifying the South Pole. While the magnetic and geomagnetic poles move along with the planet’s magnetic field — and they’re near Vostok Station on the Adélie Coast anyway — the actual South Pole itself remains fixed. The problem is that the ice on top of it does move, so every year the marker needs to be moved back to alignment — about 10 meters.

Andrea Thompson, Scientific American

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